Team up! Wasteland 2 Hits $2.1m, Obsidian On Board

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Let there much be rejoicing. Go on, rejoice. Well, at least smile. No? Well, how about a smiley instead? You won’t have to use your face at all. You only have to press two buttons. Come on, let’s do it together. On three. One, two, three : And again. One, two, three )

There now, that wasn’t so hard, was it? The reason for this rejoicing is that Wasteland 2 just hit its latest crowdsourcing bonus target, $2.1 million – and as well as meaning it’s now accrued some 231% of its original target, it confirms that Obsidian’s Chris Avellone is coming onboard to co-develop Brian Fargo’s post-apocalyptic RPG.

Avellone has already changed his Twitter icon to a Desert Ranger badge and observed that he “can’t wait to get started.” And I can’t wait to see what gets made. For more on the inXile/Obsidian tag-team, you’ll be wanting to read my interview with project lead Brian Fargo from a few days back.

Further additions and improvements to Wasteland 2 are promised if the donations climb yet higher, so you know where to go if you want to throw some more money in that. Oh, and if you notice that the Kickstarter page isn’t quite at $2.1m and thus feel I should be sternly accused of premature celejaculation, do bear in mind that the funding is augmented by another $42,000-odd in Paypal donations from those who can’t use Kickstarter for one reason or another.

One thing I do note is that, on Kickstarter, the game has ‘only’ 42,636 donors making up the current $2.08m. That’s a princely and incredible number of paying customers to have before the product’s on sale by anyone’s maths, but it does seem that Wasteland 2 has gotten to the enviable position it’s in today because of a limited number of people paying higher sums rather than because there’s been an absolutely absurd flood of contributors.

It’s frustratingly hard to make useful observations as to whether that 42,636 says anything meaningful about the potential size of Wasteland 2’s audience until the game’s on sale conventionally. It’s odd that we’re still so far away from the resolution of Kickstarted projects such as this and Double Fine’s – we still don’t know how these mega-crowdsourced endeavours are going to play out. Interesting times. Exciting times, even. Mathematical times too.

Oh man I really hope we make $3.0m. I think the more money get’s pumped into the game, the more copies will get sold, the more successor games there will be! ^^ Not to mention a modding kit which will only happen when sales are okayish.

I think 3M is definitely within reach, once the final 24 hour surge kicks in. It’s funny how many people still don’t seem to realize that the money is withdrawn from your account at the end of the project, not at the moment you pledge.

I though tthe biggest part of the Obsidian angle was getting access to their well developed story toolset. Basically licensing their tools for use in creating the game. That, plus Chris helps out a tiny bit.

I wouldn’t worry too much. The Wasteland 2 team has no obligation whatsoever to implement any feature that its backers request/demand, so they’ll be able to filter out the bad ideas just fine. Since they will already have the money of the backers at that point, they won’t have to be afraid of losing out because the backers weren’t catered to.

It’s odd that more efforts to preserve cRPG history on the publishing side haven’t been made, isn’t it? Legally, I mean.

Yeah, there’s abandonware sites, and you can find them on eBay if you know what you’re looking for, but it’s depressing how poorly the industry – and that part of the industry in particular – has managed to communicate its own history. The Gold Box games, for example, should be available on GOG. Same with Wizardry. cRPGs didn’t start with Black Isle, but you often get that impression from looking at the non-shady sites.

Indeed, though it’s worth mentioning that GOG.com now has a number of key series including Ultima, Might and Magic and Realms of Arkania. I’m sure eventually Wizardry, The Bard’s Tale and the Gold Box games will be on sale again because they are too important to forget.

The games I’m more worried about in the long term are the lesser known games that there will never be a large public demand for. Typing “Phantasie” into GOG’s most wanted search bar reveals an entry with only 6 “wants”. Typing “Demon’s Winter” in reveals no entry at all! Compare that to the 2055 for Pool of Radiance, 1100 for Wizardry VII and 763 for The Bard’s Tale…

I have no problem with abandonware myself so this doesn’t really affect me personally. I own a lot of these games too. However, it seems to me that gamers are far more likely to start playing an old game once it shows up on GOG.com. Just look at the huge surge in popularity of the Ultima and Might and Magic games since they popped up on GOG.com.

Demon’s Winter is definitely worth a play though, as is Magic Candle, Legacy of the Ancients (yes i know this doesn’t fit your RPG definition, according to you it would be an ARPG with a lot of non-A), Dark Heart of Urukul, or Alternate Reality: the City (which is more interesting in archeological terms than as a game, at this point).

Phantasie was crap yet you name Alternate Reality and Legacy of the Ancients? Phantasie is a very comfortable game to play these days. It’s basically like an early Wizardry or Bard’s Tale game but with top down “clear the shroud” dungeon exploration.

The rest of the games you named are top quality though. Dark Heart of Uukrul would be a great example of what I’m talking about as it doesn’t even have an entry in GOG.com’s “most wanted”.

Phantasie came out in the same year as The Bard’s Tale and brought far more to the table than that game ever did. The whole top down map uncovering exploration, the multitude of non-standard playable races and the multiple attack options (thrust, slash, lunge, parry etc.) were all things that either hadn’t been explored before 1985 or were very rare in the genre’s early days. The third game even had an extensive injury system and I can tell you for sure that by 1987 injury systems in CRPGs hadn’t been explored in much depth.

Legacy of the Ancients is pretty much an early Ultima/Questron clone and it came out in 1987! It was at least 3 to 5 years behind its time in everything other than the whole set-up/story.

I can agree that Alternate Reality was fascinating. It was also incredibly ahead of its time. It’s unfortunately not a very good game (and is incomplete). I’d love to see a remake/reimagining of that game.

People making demands on a game company’s forum, in regards to the direction a project should take while in development, disgust me. Were I in charge of the company’s forum I would warn them once for making demands. The next time I would ban. Period.

I know, I know. Its harsh. But we see the same thing all the time in modding forums. You make something to the best of your ability. You release it. People immediately begin demanding you make it something else instead. Happens. Every. Time.

These people suffer from a complete inability to appreciate anything they are given. Don’t bother making anything they want, as this will not satisfy their desire to make demands. Instead, you will be seen as caving into their demands to manage your project, and they will make even more demands, and display an even greater lack of patience.

Warn, ban and lock the topic threads. Or do worse. Participate in discussions with polite fans who just want to talk about the game, and completely ignore posts and threads pertaining to demands for features and content.

I think you are being a bit too rash. Good developers always listen to their fans even if they dont plan to implement their demands. There were a lots stupid ideas like marriage and romances asked for on the forum, even if those things dont have anything to do with Wasteland its counterproductive to simply ban those users. Instead as seen on forums it is a chance to enlighten newcomers about original Wasteland and what it really is.

Yeah, it was perhaps a bit harsh. I think – not to excuse my initial response completely – that its a reaction based on overexposure to this sort of behavior. Frequenting mod sites as I have lately – mostly due to skyrim modding – I have seen this sort of thing time and again of late. It just gets so…old.

Ahh well…to each their own, and kudos to InExile for dealing with it politely.

My concern, and the reason I’m probably going to hold onto my money for another week or so while I work it out, is that Fargo is a little too responsive to fan input. I was literally about to pay when the whole “social” fiasco went down, and the way he kowtowed to the kneejerk reaction of his fans’ vitriol really made me hesitate.

It seems like some people out there explicitly want Wasteland 2 to be Wasteland in a slightly nicer engine, with no other improvements whatsoever. Me, I could do without the text parser and with a few bells and whistles that modern technology affords and that don’t detract from a game’s vision. I don’t need this to be a retro demake, I want an actual game.

His message was more, “I strayed outside the design document and I shouldn’t have done that. I want you to give guys the game you want to play.” I’m not entirely comfortable with that. I want him to make the game he wants and not listen too much to the vocal minority of people who want him to build a time machine back to 1988. I trust Brian Fargo, but not much else.

Wow, I missed that. It nearly makes me want to cancel my backing because i hate “social gaming” so much.

Really anyone who is not developing a facebook game should know better than to use that adjective in this decade when describing their project. it’s not going to win over anyone who reads the game press.

His “apology” isn’t very inspiring either, because it says, paraphrasing “sorry, some people seem to think social means casual, and I didn’t mean that.” I find casual nearly as hot-button a word as social. For starters, few people really know what it means. Secondly, it’s supposedly bad in most circles but people are very incoherent about whether they dislike accessibility, ease of success, shallowness, appealing presentation, or what. The most common thing to complain about is “easy”, which is really a very uninspired thing to complain about. Some games are about challenge, but most aren’t. Many games allow you to seek out or avoid challenge as you choose. Is that casual or hardcore? Well neither, of course, so this term is useless.

The problem with the term ‘social’ isn’t that it suggests casual, it suggest horrid game design with pay-more-dollars-to-take-more-actions type stuff.

Jrodman, the post where he first brought up social aspects specified that it would be like the Graffiti system in Dark Souls – people in other games can make messages that you can read at a bulletin board, or something like that. Nothing to do with money.

It’s certainly a shame that the word Social has been corrupted so much, seeing as tabletop RPGs are the most social games in existence.

I think that Fargo’s mistake initially was not making it clear enough that the social stuff would be optional. I was wondering whether to pull out until the update explaining that the social was ‘opt in’ went up. Once it did I was placated.

@Gormongous – If you look at jrodman’s reaction, multiply that by hundreds and hundreds of backers, and *that* is why Fargo was so quick to back off on the social gaming features. The term has a LOT of negative connotations for many people – people that he is counting on for their money and goodwill. And since he was initially vague about what he meant, people were free to let their imaginations run wild and assume the worst. And even the mild forms of social stuff he was suggesting can potentially have far-reaching game design consequences – even for those who opt-out. Things like ongoing nerfs to cool items or abilities because they are exploitable for the multiplayer scoreboard or make it too easy to get certain “achievements”. Or tuning the in-game economy and loot to be balanced for ongoing multiplayer trading at an auction house, rather than for single player, where every player each find the best stuff and be loaded with money by the end of the game. For people he just sold on giving them a classic old-school-style single player RPG, these are NOT happy thoughts.

So OF COURSE he is going to clarify what he said and reassure people he is not planning to implement their worst fears. And at that point, the best thing to do is set the issue aside for a later date when things have settled down, and he has a more definite idea of what he would like to do. This is not kowtowing to whining players, it’s reassuring his customers that his focus is first and foremost on giving them what hehad promised he would.

“Not only will you fund the development, but you’ll have a voice in how the game goes together. We will have forums up for design discussion and soliciting your ideas for what will make Wasteland 2 rock.

This is your chance to influence the kind of game you want to see. With fan funding, you drive the direction of game design and development. If it is important to you, it is important to us.”

“demand” and “feedback” are very different in intent, but in the end it is the same: A bit of game they want. If they word it poorly as a demand instead of a suggestion it can be annoying, but it doesn’t change the idea they are asking to have implemented. It is important to have this sort of thing if you want to have the best brain-storming possible. When you start to judge the character of the person making “demands” or “requests” you are basically shooting the messenger, which says more about you than them.

That’s funny. People that white knight for developers and pretend they have intimate knowledge of their creative vision disgust me.

You must realize that you’re guilt of exactly the same thing only you’re arguing for a perceived status quo. Both exert the same pressures on the design team as pressure to stay the same is functionally equivalent to pressure to change.

The only thing I saw people asking for was for LGBT people to be represented in the game world, realistic NPCs and the like, think Arcade and Veronica in Fallout: New Vegas.

I didn’t see anyone asking for any sort of romances whatsoever, but the thread in question immediately derailed into people railing against “gay romances” because some people have no reading comprehension and instant tunnel vision whenever LGBT-anything-at-all is brought up.

I’m pretty sure he mentioned several times by now that the Fallout fans will be “happy” with Wasteland 2 and that it’ll be a mix between what they learned from Wasteland and Fallout after that, we already know it’ll not be a top-down game but isometric (or cavalier oblique like Fallout :P) and thank god for that. One of the most prominent features it’ll keep from Wasteland in its main design is the 5+3 party of 5 characters you can create and 3 NPCs.

I’ve never played Wasteland and don’t really intend to because of the looks, I was mainly an Adventure and Jump&Run fan back in the day, because those games didn’t attempt to give me eye cancer and their UI didn’t attempt to make me want to kill myself like early Shooters and RPGs did and usually had an unique art style, I only got into the other genres when they came of age and could resemble some of their concept arts properly. I’d gladly play a Remake of the game though.

To be perfectly clear, I started gaming back in the ZX Spectrum days and tried several RPGs when it came to the DOS era, I think one of the first Ultimas… like Ultima 2 or such was one of them, also Ultima Underworld, one of two of the Wizardry series etc. and I absolutely couldn’t get into them… I never understood (even back then) why the UI of the game has to take 3/4 of the screen and why they weren’t more like games on the Spectrum or NES when it came to that or the presentation. I also absolutely couldn’t get into the pseudo-3D movement where you had to click arrows on the screen to change directions etc. and I absolutely don’t want any of those design choices to ever come back as they just break the games for me.

I’d appreciate the complexity some of these games offered and other things from their basic design etc. though… I think one of the first RPGs I actually enjoyed was Albion, Ultima 7 etc. and it only became my “favorite” genre come Baldur’s Gate and Ultima Online.

Click buttons on the screen to move? What? Use the keyboard… Wizardry even used WAX(S)D back in 1981.

In my opinion, CRPGs declined rapidly after 1993. Fallout and Baldur’s Gate were part of a mini late 90s revival for sure, but then action games took over the genre. You could see this trend happening with the way those games were designed. Fallout took the turn-based combat from older games yet scrapped the party (making turn-based combat rather pointless), while Baldur’s Gate featured a real-time combat system with a pause function. Similarly, the Might and Magic revival in 1998 resulted in a real-time combat mode. The genre just wasn’t the same again.

Out of curiosity, what aspects of the original Wasteland do you want to see preserved that differ from Fallout 1-2? (A couple come to mind for me: full party creation, control of party during battle, less realistic approach to the post-apocalypse.)

IMHO, Fallout was an unmitigated improvement in certain areas. The combat system was a gazillion times better, the interface was better, and the skills were more balanced. Those are things I’d be very disappointed to see missing from Wasteland 2.

The combat system in Fallout was a million times worse. Critical hits were stupid in that you could suddenly die in one shot due to a random number. The AI was completely broken in that your companions would get in your way and that you could beat any opponent by hopping behind cover with your final action point. The combat was also a lot slower in larger battles as you had to sit through lengthy animations. Aiming for the eyes became the standard tactic half way through the game so that the rest of the combat options became meaningless etc.

Another feature in Wasteland that I want to see again is the ability to split up your party and send them off around the world. I also loved the idea of being able to use your attributes as well as your skills on in game objects. I hope the game keeps that too.

In FO2 at least, aiming for limbs can trump eyes in some cases. Wanamingos being a big one, since their insane toughness means the usual eyeshots still won’t kill them that fast, so it’s worth slowing them down and making them flee instead.

And everyone loves a groinshot. (But, yeah, it’s largely a case of listening to the wisdom of Minsc.)

Fallout combat had its problems, but if we’re talking about fusing its spatial, visual (i.e. not menu-based) approach with that of Wasteland (i.e. full party under your control), I think it would be an unmitigated improvement over both systems.

Dunno. All you’ve said is that being able to move your characters around the battlefield results in more tactical combat. That’s pretty much a given. I think the issue is that CRPGs don’t need highly tactical combat to be an RPG. In fact, just a single skill check to resolve combat will still result in an RPG. The question here is does Wasteland need tactical combat? What made Wasteland shine and what sort of elements should the game focus on? Having played the first Wasteland multiple times, it’s pretty obvious that what stands out in the game is everything other than its combat. Would a game in which you spend 15 minute periods playing through highly tactical combat be an obvious sequel to Wasteland? I don’t think so. A quick menu based system wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, and certainly wouldn’t take away from a game’s RPG credentials (although I understand that’s not what you are saying).

I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. Near as I can tell, you’re saying, “Wasteland’s combat was its least impressive feature, therefore they shouldn’t try to improve it.” Which can’t be right, can it?

Improving combat doesn’t necessarily mean making it slower and more tactical so that it becomes one of the most significant and time consuming aspects of the game. I don’t understand where the people who want Jagged Alliance 2’s combat are coming from. Wasteland was absolutely nothing like Jagged Alliance 2. It’s like wanting a hypothetical Wizardry 9 to use Knights of the Chalice’s combat system.

New World Computing realised that Might and Magic’s combat wasn’t among its stand out features and therefore made one of the fastest turn-based combat systems for Might and Magic III. Sure, some people preferred the combat in the first two games because they were more tactical and a hell of a lot slower, and on their own I too prefer those systems, but what this change brought about was a shift in focus towards the elements that made the Might and Magic series stand out.

If tactical combat was the only measure of a good RPG then Sir-Tech would have abandoned blob combat for Wizardry IV after seeing SSI’s Wizard’s Crown. Why are “menu-based” RPGs still being made for consoles and hand-helds when we’ve had combat where you could move around units individually for decades? Furthermore, and this is probably the most important case, why is there such as huge variety of pen and paper RPGs with different focuses? You’ll notice that pen and paper RPGs with a higher focus on non-combat activities have much simpler combat systems than D&D (compare Wasteland to Pool of Radiance for computer game equivalents).

Personally, I can’t say that I’ve noticed any real correlation between simplistic combat systems and a focus on non-combat activities in RPGs. In any event, I can see no good reason why an RPG can’t have both tactically rich, satisfying combat and a wide variety of non-combat activities in the game. I mean, spatial combat isn’t *that* resource-intensive to implement.

I wouldn’t worry too much about the sales, if that’s what the number speculation is about. I’m sure there’s a fair amount of people out there like me, who have been following a couple kickstarters, including this one since the beginning, are interested, but simply haven’t had the time to create a new account log on and donate yet. or don’t have the funds free at the moment or any other myriad possibilities/distractions. I suspect this is probably a factor in the last day jumps in donations that we’ve seen for quite a few projects.

Just pure statistics – 10 million for a single platform game, from 10 to 30 million for a multi platform game. Although some bigger projects tend to reach the 50 million mark. In any case the 2.1 million here are actually almost spare change nowadays. Fallout 1 had a budget of 3 million and that was 15 years ago. Oh, and those figures are about the development budget only, no marketing costs included.

On a side note, a simple calculation showed that the average Wasteland 2 contributor has paid about 50 bucks, meaning just about the price of an AAA PC title. I wouldn’t say it’s that much.

Supposedly the most expensive video game budget to date was Star Wars: The Old Republic at around $200 million.

On the other hand you get something like Dear Esther which the Indie Fund gave $55,000. Though I believe a lot of the development was done by the time they got money from Indie Fund. Not AAA, but nice as a juxtaposition.

For “regular” games here is an article from two years ago claiming an average budget is in the realm of $25 million. Of course this is a couple years old so costs may have increased since then a bit.link to escapistmagazine.com

Indie games get a bit more complicated, as you might end up with people who either aren’t taking a salary or are taking a reduced salary, in trade for eventual success or even notoriety.

You get a similar situation with indie or backyard film projects, where people trumpet a film or effects laden short that “only” costs a few hundred dollars. While you can argue that both official film and game salary rates are overpriced for the results, you also cannot fairly remove salary entirely from the production cost.

It isn’t the game so much as the promotion that raises the cost. It’s not uncommon for the marketing to be twice the game budget. Which leads to rediculous situations where the game is considered a failure for *only* selling half a million copies and so not recovering the cost of advertising.

I don’t know about modern games, but NWN had 160 man years of work and BG2 had 90 man years of work. If done at a really cheap salary, $30k, that’s 4.8 and 2.7 million respectively. If done at a fair, probably non-competitive (don’t work in the industry) $50k, that’s 8 and 4.5 million. Lower it for some crunch work, but not too much because crunch work isn’t as productive.

Well the world is exciting. The party and turn based combat, not that much. Currently replaying (and quite enjoying) Fallout 1 but really, can’t say there’s a huge depth to the combat. And I always thought a RPG with a party rather than one character (or 1 + companions) is anti climatic. That being said I didn”t play Wasteland I : if combats were better than Fallout’s ones, then maybe.

Probably because most “single character RPGs” feature a story about your character being the special one and the end is usually some personal climactic bullshit. Long gone are the days when you just play as a band of nobodies making names for themselves in a war ravaged society.

Apparently RPGs are games in which you explore the psyche of various deeply troubled personalities and reflect deeply on morality.

This is brilliant – not just because of the pedigree (Brian Fargo!) attached to it or the love we old timers have for the franchise – but also because in addition to this, Double Fine’s and that Shadow Run remake, we get to see how Kickstarter funding affects mainstream gaming properties.

I think that it is a dangerous slippery slope that won’t pan out of most. In fact, I said as much in an on-camera video interview at GDC last month.

“Some people are comparing Kickstarter to pre-orders”
Well, you did it yourself in the sentence above this.

Anyway, you have a point in that some people will take the devs saying they will give backers the opportunity of influencing the development as their right of having the game they want. An enthusiastic fan can quickly turn into Angry Internet Man if he doesn’t get exactly what he wants.

I was referring to “Now Wasteland 2 has almost 50K pre-orders.”
I do hope people understand that backing a project on kickstarter is something very different to pre-ordering. What you do is pledging money to an idea, nothing else. Personally, I’m fine with that, and I’m well aware that the probability of one of the projects I’m backing will fail is pretty high.

A slippery slope to 5% of people being pissed at the final product doesn’t sound especially dangerous. There’s always bitching from a vocal minority about every game, regardless of quality and regardless of the business model used.

The end product being not *exactly* as everybody hoped for is a non-issue compared to the first time somebody comes out and says “We went way over budget, the game’s not coming out anymore and you’re not getting your money back” or “Our unnamed private investors pulled out, so the game isn’t getting made and you’re not getting your money back”. People will be more discerning about KS projects after that. They should probably be more discerning already, because it’s almost inevitable that one or more of these projects is going to end in tears.